Reinventing Grey Gardens: A Drawn-Out Drama in Itself

Robert J. Eckholm

OASIS Grey Gardens, in views from the house to the ocean, has come far since Benjamin C. Bradlee and Sally Quinn bought it in 1979. They added a pool, and after overgrowth was cleared, hired Victoria Fensterer who planted hydrangea and juniper. More Photos »

Courtesy of Sally Quinn

LIMELIGHT, at least the reflected kind, is again shining on Grey Gardens, a 10-bedroom 1897 house near Georgica Pond here. Thirty-four years after its former residents, Edith Bouvier Beale, known as Big Edie, and her namesake daughter, who was called Little Edie, were introduced to the world in the Maysles brothers’ classic documentary, and three years after their life in the tumbledown raccoon-infested mansion on a wildly overgrown lot became the basis of a Broadway musical, HBO is rolling out a feature-length movie about them, also called “Grey Gardens,” this weekend.

The two Edies have become famous for the way they lived at Grey Gardens — the squalor of their home was especially striking given that Big Edie was an aunt and Little Edie a first cousin of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis — and they will soon be even better known after being portrayed by Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore in the HBO film.

The house’s current owners, who restored it after buying it from Little Edie in 1979, are celebrities themselves: Sally Quinn, the writer and Washington hostess, and her husband, Benjamin C. Bradlee, the former editor of The Washington Post. The couple have taken up residence at Grey Gardens every summer for decades, and have used it to entertain friends like Lauren Bacall and Norman Lear.

But one person intimately involved with the property is unlikely to be known to even the most hard-core Grey Gardens buff. For 23 years, Victoria Fensterer, an artist who designed and maintains the current gardens, has worked year round to preserve something of the wild spirit of the Beales’ Grey Gardens, on grounds that can nevertheless be navigated. “It is so lush, it’s on the edge of becoming decadent,” said Eden Rafshoon, a retired interior designer who has visited the Bradlees every summer for the last decade. “It’s extremely romantic, it’s very fragrant, and it’s extremely sensuous. It’s full of secret garden rooms and mystery.”

Ms. Fensterer began working on the property in the mid-1980s, several years after a bulldozer had cleared its two acres of the dense thicket of prickly aralia spinosa, commonly called devil’s walking stick, that had overtaken it. Early on, Ms. Quinn and Mr. Bradlee hired a gardener to plant a circle of flowers and two rows of apple trees near the house, but the results were far from what Ms. Quinn had envisioned. “It looked like a new garden,” she said, “but I wanted it to be wild. I wanted it to be just on the verge of being over the top. I wanted it to look like it happened by itself. I didn’t want it to be manicured in any way, because the house isn’t that way.”

Ms. Quinn met Ms. Fensterer in the summer of 1985 during a visit to her friends and next-door neighbors, the writers Nora Ephron and Nicholas Pileggi, for whom she had just planted several flower gardens.

Then 39, Ms. Fensterer had only recently begun working as a professional gardener. Although she had grown up tending delphiniums, roses, wisteria and apples in the backyard of her childhood home in Queens, she had studied sculpture in college and spent her 20s and 30s as a vagabond painter and blues singer, traveling in Europe and taking road trips across the United States in a Volkswagen bus. It wasn’t until she planted her front yard in Amagansett, N.Y., the town where she had moved in 1979, that she began to recognize gardening as a practice at which she could make the most of her strong senses of color, proportion and texture.

Her romantic cottage garden attracted the attention of several neighbors who asked if her services were available for hire, including one who knew Ms. Ephron.

In the months after Ms. Quinn hired her, Ms. Fensterer began studying the site, with the intention of beginning to plant in the spring of 1986. Clearing the immense thicket had revealed that the rectangular property, with the house at the center, was made up of several sections. Behind the house on the right was a wide-open space where Mr. Bradlee and Ms. Quinn had installed a swimming pool. Three tall privet hedges that had survived the bulldozing outlined an area to the left of the pool where Little Edie had said in the documentary that she had wanted a vegetable garden. And next to the house on the right was a cement wall enclosing a square the size of the house itself, which the original owner built to protect a flower garden and that had given the property its name.